We are busier than we have ever been. We’ve been growing as we have brought on new clients while adding new search consultants. At the same time, we are spending more and more time testing as we try to find the right bids, keywords, campaigns, ad copy to maximize our clients’ budgets in a very challenging retail year.

We have seen our client’s paid search traffic decline while the cost per order increase by over 10%. While click through rates are down, the main factor for the increase in cost per order is the significant decrease in site and search conversion rates. A more indepth review was completed by the Rimm-Kaufmann Group who found that sales from search have declined by 20% since July 2008. Since the beginning of the year, AOV has declined by 10%. Their main conclusion - fewer people are shopping and obviously are spending less when they do.

The critical question - what should we do in paid search to generate sales in our struggling economy? Here are a few recommendations:

Concentrate efforts on the market segments where you outshine the competition. Why spend hours optimizing campaigns where your depth of product is shallow and your prices are not competitive?

Be very critical of your ad copy. Search on your key terms and compare your ads to your competition. Would you buy if you were a consumer based on what your ad is saying?

Get rid of unwanted traffic. I love finding new negative keywords as much as finding ones that drive good traffic. If you are using mostly broad match terms, type in only a portion of your broad match terms and see what is returned by the search engines. There are so many great sources for finding negative keywords, but I like using my marketing brain the best (and then go to these sources to fill the gaps!).

Continue to test, test, test. Make certain that you are truly testing and not just changing elements of your program. And, let it run long enough to get statistically valid results or when your gut says to turn up or off. The best part of search is the ability to make changes and see almost an immediate impact.

Look at the bounce rates and time spent on high budget campaigns. You may be bidding on the right words with great copy, but landing page does not sell the product! It is easy to see the sites where management believes the internet is an “ordering channel” versus a “selling” one. Decide what you want to sell and SELL it to the consumer. Convince consumers that they need the product.

Always be on the lookout for new keywords. My great places - Google’s Keyword Tool, Google’s Keyword Opportunities in Adwords Editor, Google SK Tools, Compete.com. But my favorite place is to match my paid search terms against the organic terms to the site to find the gaps.

Especially if you have an in-house person managing your search, make sure they are leveraging the very active blogging, article-writing online advertising community. Search nuances change every week. They may be minor changes that could have a great impact on your search program. Ones on my radar include PPC Hero and Search Engine Land as well as following David Szetela and Marty Weintraub on Twitter.

As they say, there is no such thing as managing time. You need to concentrate on the basics and establish priorities that leverage your competitive advantage. What you can do is make sure the time spent is reflective of your company’s priorities.